Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction ed. by Zachary Kendal et al. (review)

the human’s “adaptation of its body” (269) through a blending with something non-human strikes the reader as egregiously tone deaf. Greenham’s attempt to rewrite the “genotypic horror,” which literary scholar Mitch Frye describes as designed to elicit “genetic fear” (“The Refinement of the ‘Crude Allegory’: Eugenic Themes and Genotypic Horror in the Weird Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft” [Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 17.3 (2006): 237-54]), falls well short of the intellectual and social expectations of the twenty-first century. For, as Alberto Alcaraz Escarcega of Brown University suggests, “Lovecraft’s race thinking cannot be separated from his body of work” (“The Racial Imaginaries” website). This oversight, along with the book’s escalating emphasis on chaos and psychosis, ultimately mark it as a difficult and unrewarding read. What is, on the surface, a meticulous work of impressive theoretical reimagining disappoints the conscientious reader, as it overlooks Lovecraft’s blatant racism while embodying its own chaotic vision of the universe as a psychotic entity. I am left asking myself, what have I have gained from reimagining Lovecraft’s universe, and those of his successors, as a “writhing, non-linear ocean of chaos” (299) whose very foundation is one of paradox and instability? Has the field of science fiction been enriched by this “philosophical extension” of cosmicism or have I, the reader, been duped? —E Mariah Spencer, Illinois State University